Cirrus@Austlit

'Shot in late 1972 and released at the Melbourne Filmmakers Co-op in mid-September 1974,Dave Jones’ Yackety Yack is one of the key films made in that transitional period between the relative “void” of homegrown Australian feature-film production in the 1950s and 1960s and the “renaissance” that gathered steam in the mid-1970s. It opened to minimal fanfare in that pivotal year, a 12-month period that saw unprecedented commercial success at the Australian box office through films like Alvin Rides Again (David Bilcock and Robin Copping), Stone (Sandy Harbutt), Petersen (Tim Burstall), Barry McKenzie Holds His Own (Bruce Beresford) and Number 96 (Peter Benardos), but also saw the arrival of such prescient, independent, socially engaged and less audience friendly works as 27A (Esben Storm), Between Wars (Michael Thornhill) and, more playfully, Yackety Yack.'  (Introduction)

'Most discussion of the career of Cecil Holmes focuses, understandably, on the 30-year body of work he completed after migrating to Australia from New Zealand in 1949. Those who comment on Holmes’ much shorter stint in the New Zealand film industry are generally preoccupied with his infamous sacking from the National Film Unit (NFU) only three weeks after Weekly Review no. 374: The Coaster (1948) was released. Holmes became both persona non grata and a martyr to the leftist or socialist cause for his role in leading the first public service strike in New Zealand. Controversy over these events and the actions taken by the Labour Government of the time centred on the manner in which knowledge and evidence of Holmes’ involvement was attained and circulated. A satchel he’d left in one of the NFU’s cars contained both a letter of instruction to the leader of the union and Holmes’ Communist Party membership card. This was purloined by individuals close to the government and leaked to the press. Although Holmes was subsequently reinstated and back paid after a period of twelve months out of work, he quickly left his birth country for Australia, never to return again.'  (Introduction)

'Cecil Holmes’s Three in One (1956) represents one of the highpoints of postwar Australian cinema, reframing the common or characteristic theme of “mateship” within more explicitly leftist contexts. But what is most remarkable about the film – which is admittedly uneven in quality, possibly inevitably so considering its tripartite form – is its visual style, both reaffirming and transforming the common preoccupations commonly found in Australian landscape cinema. Also significant are the international models of filmmaking aesthetics that it openly draws upon, ranging from Soviet Montage to Italian neorealism. These plainly visible influences also betray Holmes’s cinephilia; he was a key figure in the New Zealand film society movement of the 1940s, and ran a company, New Dawn Films, that distributed European cinema later in the 1950s.' (Introduction)

'Although born in New Zealand, Cecil Holmes is nevertheless one of the most significant and ambitious filmmakers to work in Australia between the 1950s and the 1970s. A dedicated leftist, in fact a communist, his work consistently demonstrated a humanitarian commitment to the socially disenfranchised, ranging from the underlying capitalist conditions that force decent citizens into bushranging and stealing, to the social, political, cultural and economic conditions confronting Indigenous communities in contemporary Australia. After starting his career with New Zealand’s National Film Unit – where he made the Grierson-like short, The Coaster (1948), and Golden Bay (1949), amongst others – Holmes instigated the first public-service strike in his homeland, and not long after fled to Australia. His initial work in his new country was completed under John Heyer at the Shell Film Unit, hardly the most apt or nurturing environment for a filmmaker of Holmes’s overriding political, social and cultural allegiances. Moving out from under such corporate and governmental patronage was certainly the making of Holmes as a filmmaker, even if he then often struggled to get his subsequent films of the 1950s into the marketplace and onto screens.' (Introduction)

'This edited collection assesses the complex historical and contemporary relationships between US and Australian cinema by tapping directly into discussions of national cinema, transnationalism and global Hollywood. While most equivalent studies aim to define national cinema as independent from or in competition with Hollywood, this collection explores a more porous set of relationships through the varied production, distribution and exhibition associations between Australia and the US.  To explore this idea, the book investigates the influence that Australia has had on US cinema through the exportation of its stars, directors and other production personnel to Hollywood, while also charting the sustained influence of US cinema on Australia over the last hundred years. It takes two key points in time—the 1920s and 1930s and the last twenty years—to explore how particular patterns of localism, nationalism, colonialism, transnationalism and globalisation have shaped its course over the last century. The contributors re-examine the concept and definition of Australian cinema in regard to a range of local, international and global practices and trends that blur neat categorisations of national cinema. Although this concentration on US production, or influence, is particularly acute in relation to developments such as the opening of international film studios in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and the Gold Coast over the last thirty years, the book also examines a range of Hollywood financed and/or conceived films shot in Australia since the 1920s.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

Stanley Kramer’s fizzingly apocalyptic On the Beach (1959) dominates and defines popular understandings of Melbourne’s cinematic representation in the 1950s. Shot in the city and its surroundings from January to March 1959, and released internationally towards the end of the year, both the film and Nevil Shute’s source novel have been highly influential in reinforcing and promoting specific understandings of 1950s Melbourne as a staid, sleepy, uneventful and architecturally conservative metropolis. This hard-to-shake view of Melbourne has been further compounded by the lack of comparative feature film images of the city (a brief view in 1952’s Road to Bali excepted) and its appearance in such international documentaries as The Melbourne Rendezvous (1957). But Melbourne does appear more dynamically in a range of less noted and disparate short films, mini-features and documentaries produced by government funded entities like the Australian National Film Board and the State Film Centre of Victoria, small production entities formed around the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Melbourne (often made by major Melbourne architects such as Robin Boyd and Peter McIntyre) and the Melbourne University Film Society, and such maverick independent filmmakers as Giorgio Mangiamele. Many of the works also provide a more critical, though at times celebratory, view of the changing cityscape of Melbourne (height limits for buildings were “exploded” by the completion of ICI House in 1958), the tentative embrace of modernity and internationalisation (e.g. the impact of the 1956 Melbourne Olympics) and the changing ethnicities of the inner city and suburbs. This essay maps and challenges broader understandings of Melbourne’s filmic representation in the 1950s by exploring the various ways in which the city is figured in unjustly forgotten or marginalised films like The Melbourne Wedding Belle (1953), Your House and Mine (1954) and Sunday in Melbourne (1958).